Posts Tagged ‘art’

Deborah Orloff, professor of photography and associate chair of The University of Toledo Department of Art, has received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council for her body of work, “Elusive Memory.”

According to the Ohio Arts Council website, the excellence awards “are peer recognition of artists for the exceptional merit of a body of their work that advances or exemplifies the discipline and the larger artistic community. These awards support artists’ growth and development and recognize their work in Ohio and beyond.”

Orloff said the $5,000 grant will be used to expand her “Elusive Memory” series and to exhibit it nationally.

The work was inspired by an experience she had following the death of her father in 2007 when she was preparing a eulogy for his funeral. While drawing upon specific memories, she realized all of them were directly connected to photographs, causing her to wonder if she remembered the moments, or if the pictures had created false memories.

“I wanted to make work about this phenomenon, but the project didn’t actually take form until many years later,” Orloff said.

“About five years ago, I inherited thousands of neglected prints and slides that had been in my father’s basement, where they were damaged by flooding. I started photographing them in the studio, not knowing what I would do with the images, but hoping to salvage some of the family pictures for posterity,” she said. “It wasn’t until I saw them enlarged on a computer screen that I recognized their poignancy and greater relevance: I saw metaphors for loss and the fragmentary, ephemeral nature of memory.”

(Exhibit is on display, however the opening reception has been postponed TFN – We will announce the rescheduling of this event.)

UT alumna and artist Leslie Adams will present an exhibition at the Center for the Visual Arts on the University’s Toledo Museum of Art Campus.

The exhibition, “The Handwritten Dreams Project,” will open Friday, June 1, and be on display through Saturday, July 7.

Adams will discuss her work Friday, June 1, at 5 p.m. in the Toledo Museum of Art Little Theatre.

A reception will follow the lecture from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Center for the Visual Arts Main Gallery.

“Drawing is my first love, but I’m infatuated with cursive — with signatures, poetry and long letters from friends — anything written in one’s own hand,” Adams said. “And I love dreams. I love the dreamers of dreams.

“A self-portrait, ‘Handwritten Dreams’ celebrates the hopes and aspirations that we, as children and adults, universally share. It is a drawing, installation and interactive work that provides the space and time where viewers can pause, reflect and write their own dreams on paper. Each then pins their hopes to an endlessly growing ‘wall of dreams’ in the symbolically staged 1970s’ classroom that I remember as a child,” she said.

“As a young school girl, I was taught to be curious, inspired to dream, and encouraged to record my dreams in perfect penmanship. It made them real,” Adams said. “I am so fortunate that my dream of becoming an artist came true, and my goal as an artist is to inspire others to believe in possibility.

“Reflecting on the great cursive debate confronting today’s society, ‘Handwritten Dreams’ seamlessly marries the elegance and beauty of line found in both cursive and drawing with the very marks that are the expressions of our individuality and pure imagination.”

In 2016, “Handwritten Dreams” was presented as part of ArtPrize Eight at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich. Over 19 days, 196,000 visitors to the museum viewed the work, and approximately 50,000 people recorded their hopes, dreams and aspirations, according to Adams.

“Through the beauty of line — from nearly indecipherable scribbles to precise manuscript writing and elegant cursive — individuals conveyed their dreams for themselves, their families and for our world,”

she said. “Subsequently, we are given a time capsule of our current culture. Because the dreams echo our lives. They anticipate our future.”

The artist would like to see the wall of dreams continue to grow. In April, a portion of the project was presented at the Portrait Society of America’s International Art of the Portrait Conference and more dreams were collected.

“I am grateful to the Center for the Visual Arts for inviting me to share the installation,” Adams said. “Before ‘The Handwritten Dreams Project’ travels to other venues throughout the world, I invite you to contribute to the work by taking a moment to share your handwritten dream.”

Adams followed her dream and pursued art. She received a bachelor of fine arts degree from UT in 1989 and in 1990 won the International Collegiate Competition in Figurative Drawing, which was sponsored by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She was awarded the grand prize, a full tuition scholarship, which enabled her to attend the New York Academy of Art.

Since earning her master of fine arts degree from the academy, Adams has established herself as an eminent Ohio artist. She has been commissioned to paint more than a dozen official portraits for the state of Ohio. In addition to painting the most recent official gubernatorial portraits, she has portrayed many leaders of the Ohio State Senate, House of Representatives and the Supreme Court of Ohio. Adams also has received commissions from universities, corporations and institutions throughout the United States.

The recent years have characterized a significant turning point in Adams’ already successful career. Her major solo exhibition, “Leslie Adams, Drawn From Life,” part of the Toledo Museum of Art’s 2012 Fall Season of Portraiture, received both critical and public acclaim. As the exhibition was drawing to a close, greater recognition followed. Adams was one of 48 artists in the country whose work was selected for inclusion in the celebrated 2013 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. That same year, her work, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl,” was awarded the William F. Draper Grand Prize in the Portrait Society of America’s 15th Annual International Portrait Competition.

The free, public exhibition can be viewed Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

The basement of the Juvenile Justice Center served as an art studio for University of Toledo students enrolled in the “Media and Methods in Therapeutic Art” course, on Monday, April 2.

Instructor Renée Obrock had her students convene at the Juvenile Court, meeting up with court-involved youth and Probation staff Tim Bauerschmidt, Bill Weis, Lisa Demko, Kristen McClain, Angie Morgan, Elizabeth Sepeda, Kineka Wallace, and Ed Cox, and East Toledo Family Center staff, Makayla King, Onna Moore, and two interns.
The group activity involved a combination paint and resin pour on top of wood plaques. Over 60 wood plaques were prepared for the two different art sessions. The work space was broken up into stations for each of the precise steps involved: from mixing the paint, combining the components for the resin, to selecting paint colors and creating.

Ms. Obrock, who has a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts and a Masters of Art Education, said class, “Media and Methods in Therapeutic Art,” hadn’t met the minimum number of registrants in a while, so she created a flier to drum up participation. The flier, circulated beyond the Art Education department to the Psychology department, helped promote the class beyond the usual majors. In short order the class filled, resulting in an opportunity for expanding the teaching of therapeutic art to non-art majors. She first became aware of the Juvenile Court’s Positive Youth Justice focus in probation through Joe Szafarowicz.

While waiting, the UT students shared the stories of the paths that brought them to this particular class and inspired their career choice. One of the students shared that while on a mission trip to Central America a language barrier was easily hurdled by “communicating through doing,”
-Marty McIntyre, JJC

Boston Voyager found my work on Instagram a few weeks ago and we ended up doing an interview. It was a good opportunity to reflect on years of decisions that led me to where I am today. Read all about the hustle.

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ani Avanian.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.My drawing professor and mentor in college, Diana Attie, once told me, “Keep doing what you love and keep your eyes open for opportunities. Good things will definitely happen.” I don’t even know if she remembers telling me this, but it was Diana’s response to my “What do I do now that I have an art degree?” In 2006 I was graduating from the University of Toledo with my Bachelors of Fine Arts, proud, but terribly stressed out about getting my first job out of college. How would I become financially self-sufficient and yet do what I love every day? It sounded very abstract at the time, but it all came together in a very unexpected way. Read more…

More than 30 works of art by UT students are on display in the 2017 Juried Student Exhibition in the Center for the Visual Arts Gallery on the University’s Toledo Museum of Art Campus.

An opening reception and award ceremony will take place Thursday, March 16, from 6 to 8 p.m. in the gallery.

“Girl With Meat” by Clairissa Martin, right, and “Political Balance” by Valerie White are included in the 2017 Juried Student Exhibition.

This year’s juror is Clara DeGalan, who was born and raised in Detroit. She attended the Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts, earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at the University of Michigan, and a master of fine arts degree in painting at Wayne State University. She teaches drawing and painting at Wayne State University and Madonna University, and writes art criticism for Detroit Art Review and InfiniteMile Detroit.

The awards ceremony will coincide with the Arts Commission 3rd Thursday Loop as the Center for the Visual Arts is one of the galleries on the route.

The free, public exhibition will be on display through Friday, March 24. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

For more information on the exhibition, contact Brian Carpenter, UT gallery director and lecturer in the Art Department, at brian.carpenter@utoledo.edu.

On November 3, 2016, a colleague and I drove six students for an hour and a half to Oberlin, Ohio, to hear African-American artist Fred Wilson (b.1954) speak about his work on the occasion of two exhibitions he installed this past year at Oberlin College’s Allen Memorial Art Museum in this small college town (my alma mater). We were already familiar with the artist, each one of us having often admired his black glass sculpture Iago’s Mirror (2009), acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) in 2010 — and currently on view in the TMA’s Gallery 6 for the temporary exhibition Shakespeare’s Characters: Playing the Part. Listening to a talk by the 1999 recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grant was inspiring and exciting. Getting to see his work in both a solo exhibition (Fred Wilson: Black to the Powers of Ten) and in the site-specific installation Wildfire Test Pit was amazing.

As a generous, instructive, insightful orator, Fred Wilson was spectacular, sharing slides as he described an artistic trajectory and longtime interest in understanding museums through their collections (“what’s there, what’s not there”). Starting out by invitation from the Maryland Historical Society, his attention began training on the Atlantic slave trade, the Indian slave trade, and movements of oil — or as he came to call such dynamics, Movement of Blackness. Giving form to institutional memory by “mining” museum collections, Wilson would feature decommissioned possessions, like slave shackles or a public whipping post, side by side with an institution’s finest silver and furniture. He spoke about installing over 50 portraits of Daniel Webster at the Hood Museum, in Dartmouth College, at the same time as a series of plaster cast busts identifying human specimens from around the world. In the case of the latter, Wilson hid racial inscriptions with sashes of mourning, to encourage viewers to see them as people, including a cast of Ota Benga, the Congolese youth exhibited at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904 who would end up committing suicide in Virginia 12 years later.

In mining the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin, Mr. Wilson found himself magnetized by Edmonia Lewis whose story “remains obscured by rumor and mystery” as one scholar puts it. An orphan of African-American and Native-American heritage from New York, Lewis began to study art at Oberlin College in 1859. A few months after the Civil War had begun, she was accused of poisoning two (white) friends, beaten by a mob, arrested, and tried. Although acquitted, she remained a target and eventually left without graduating. Heading to Boston, she secured further artistic training, before taking up residency in Rome, Italy for a few years, where Lewis enjoyed success for her marble statuary. After returning to the States she disappears from the historical record. Wilson called the nineteenth-century sculptor a “guiding light” for his site-specific installation at the Oberlin museum, which he entitled Wildfire Test Pit for the Indian name given to Edmonia Lewis and the “archaeological term for a site you dig to see what’s there.”

Our field trip to Oberlin proved intensely rewarding, inspiring reflection long afterward: on the creative process, erasure and exclusion, the construct of race as well as concepts of time or memory, the roles of museums in compressing histories, individuals recorded and those forgotten, objects acknowledged and those to be buried. In the coming weeks, students will be sharing their own thoughts about the opportunity to hear from a practicing contemporary artist and to experience the work firsthand. Please stay tuned! Fred Wilson’s work remains on view at the Allen Memorial Art Museum until June 2017.

Deborah Orloff, Professor of Art and Associate Chair of the Department of Art at The University of Toledo, has just been chosen to exhibit her new work in “Macro” an internationally juried exhibition at New York City’s Jadite Gallery. She also won a second place award from the New York Center for Photographic Art for the piece, and will have the work published in the exhibition catalog. The competitively selected exhibition was curated from an international pool of over 500 entries and will open April 21st. The attached diptych is from her current body of work, “Elusive Memory.”

In addition, 6 of Orloff’s large-scale photographs from this series were recently selected for a curated exhibition at the Riffe Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, opposite the State House at Capitol Square. The group show, “Earthly Delights,” will feature 10 artists’ photographic work and run August 4 – October 8. Five other large-scale pieces from “Elusive Memory” are currently on view at the Toledo Museum of Art Library in UT’s Center for Visual Arts through the end of the semester.

“In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.” – Susan Sontag

Do you really remember your past, or have you simply seen the photographs so many times, you believe you retain those memories? The relationship between photography and memory is complicated; it is dubious at best. I have always been fascinated with family photos and have collected them most of my life. Recently, I’ve been drawn to the abandoned pictures that were relegated to my parents’ basement. These once precious objects have been neglected and forgotten. Inadvertently exposed to water, heat, and humidity, they have undergone a powerful transformation. This new work utilizes these severely damaged pictures as subject matter. Elusive Memory explores the significance of vernacular photographs as aesthetic objects and cultural artifacts. The resulting large-scale photographs make commonplace objects monumental and emphasize their unique details. In their final representation, these banal objects become simulacra of loss and speak eloquently to the ephemeral nature of memory.

Bio

Deborah Orloff has run the Photography area at the University of Toledo‘s Center for Visual Arts and exhibited her artwork internationally for more than 20 years. She has won numerous awards for both her artwork as well as her teaching. She received her MFA in Photography from Syracuse University and her BFA from Clark University. Her work has been included in over 100 exhibitions at national and international venues that include: the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, Scotland. Orloff’s new work, Elusive Memory, was recently selected for inclusion in the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s collection as part of their Midwest Photographers Project.

The University of Toledo Department of Art has invited two guest artists to campus to exhibit their work this month. Holly Branstner and Dan McInnis will also visit with art students and speak about their work in two public lectures (TBA). Branstner’s work will be on display in the Main Gallery January 11 through February 14. McInnis’ work will be shown in the Clement Gallery January 18-February 20.

Art patrons have their choice of two opening receptions for Branstner’s exhibit of paintings and sculptures, BLACK NOISE—Thursday, January 14 from 6 to 9 p.m. and Thursday, January 21 from 5 to 9 p.m. in the UT Center for the Visual Arts. McInnis’ photography exhibit will open with the January 21 reception, which will also coincide with the Arts Commission 3rd Thursday Loop. The CVA is a featured stop on the bus route for the loop.

BLACK NOISE focuses on a series of moody and abstracted depictions and less obvious visions that begin with what remains of the industrial landscapes of Detroit’s River Rouge and the periphery of Toledo. Her work, often regardless of its subject, is always a reflection of her youth and subsequent summers spent at an idyllic Lake Louise in northern Michigan and her intimate, wrestling, and nostalgic relationship with the attracting complexities of Detroit, its surrounds, and Toledo, Ohio where she now lives.

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the University of Dayton, the University of Evansville, and Crown Equipment Corporation as well as in the personal possession of many private individuals. She has received numerous awards for her work, including three individual artist grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts and a Canaday Award from the Toledo Museum of Art. Recently she has served as an artist-in-residence at the University of Dayton where her work continues to be regularly shown in the context of exhibitions of American art from the Dicke Collection.

Source: Holly Branstner

Photographer Daniel McInnis, currently living in Perrysburg, is originally from upstate New York. He received his BFA in Film, Photography and the Visual Arts at Ithaca College’s Roy H. Park School of Communications. He has an MFA in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design where he studied with Craig Stevens. Dan has taught as a professor of both photographic practice and history at Ithaca College, The American University of Dubai, John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), School of Visual Arts (SVA) and Wittenberg University.

His work entitled “Heidi and Lily, Ohio, 2014” was selected as a finalist and shortlisted piece for the prestigious 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. This same work was chosen for Third Prize in the 2015 Photo Review competition, juried by Lawrence Miller.